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Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cloud based file backup system that put Linux FIRST? One that made it so we didn’t have to use FUSE? One that didn’t put out a Windows client first and the Linux client was an afterthought? One that you could get installed and configured quickly and easily which would allow you to ‘set it and forget it’? Me too!

In my quest to find a professional and polished distribution of Linux that used KDE as the default desktop…I tried out quite a few flavors: Kubuntu, Salix, Manjaro, PCLinuxOS and even OpenSuse. All done in the past few weeks.

Free/Libre and Open Source software versus closed and proprietary software doesn’t matter. It’s not the answer to solve all our problems. It’s not the question we need to ask anyone and everyone either. It simply doesn’t matter. Well, it might matter to you and I…but it doesn’t matter to most people out there.

Recently, I was tasked with finding files that had been modified in the past 5 days. I was to copy these files from a SAN Snapshot and move them over to a recover area that anyone could get to. We were doing this in Linux because the snapshot, which was a NTFS filesystem would only mount in Linux. It seems that Linux is more forgiving of errors on a hard disk than Windows is when dealing with NTFS.

We’ve all seen the discussions on sites like Lifehacker, PCWorld, and TechCrunch all claiming that there are multiple replacements and/or alternatives. I’ve cycled through the gamut of them and found two relatively unknown gems I’d like to share with you. I’ve used both of these for a couple of days and I can honestly say…depending on your focus when using a reader, they’re quite nice and can replace Google Reader completely for you…and chances are you haven’t heard of them.

As part of your Linux journey, you’ve probably heard of symlinks which are also known as symbolic links. I figured that since I fixed an error using symbolic links to setup an environment to allow my son to learn program. Part of this process forced me to use symlinks and I would like to share how and why one needs to create and use them.

I love CrunchBang Linux. In my opinion, it’s one of the best distributions of Linux for older computers (heck, any computer) that is actively developed. I pieced together a Gateway M250 laptop a year or so ago (3 bad ones parted out into 1 good one) and loaded it up with max RAM (2GB). It’s now a handy little 14 inch laptop with a 1.73Ghz single core Centrino processor. Not bad…but when playing videos or streaming them, it can really struggle. So keeping the operating system lightweight on it is a definite must. Enter, CrunchBang. It’s small and fast. It’s elegant and slick.

What is wrong with everyone in Linux land bagging on Mozilla Firefox and their 5.0 release? Complaints pretty much have one thing in common: They claim there isn’t enough ‘new and shiny’ things inside FF5 to warrant a major version. This is illogical thinking because major version means NOTHING when it comes to usability of software.

I am testing out Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) and wanted to benefit from Firefox 4 and all its speediness. It’s not available in the repositories and since LMDE uses Firefox and NOT Iceweasel, you really can’t install it from the Mozilla Debian repository. So, I decided to manually install things.

‘GNU tail’ is a small utility which prints (by default) the last 10 lines of any file. This an amazing piece of software not only allows you to see the last part of a file but also enables you to monitor a file’s changes without opening the file.

There comes a time in every Linux users’ life when you will open the Terminal more often than not because you have realized that it is faster, more efficient and more powerful than GUI (Graphical User Interface). You’ll have started to learn more and more commands and now feel more comfortable with command prompt. The command prompt is all about commands – short commands as well as long commands. If you are like me then you may not like to type the long commands (or even small commands) :)

Beginners are mostly afraid of command prompt. Whenever they see a command prompt, they immediately say “its very difficult”. But it’s not true. The Command prompt is as friendly as GUI (Graphical User Interface), provided if you use it with proper procedure. Most people use GUI tools to search for files. They don’t realize that they can use command line tools to search for them as well! GNU ‘find’ is such like a tool which can not only search files but can even copy, move or delete these files on the fly.

Permissions are important for keeping your data safe and secure. Utilizing permission settings in Linux can benefit you and those you want to give access to your files and you don’t need to open up everything just to share one file or directory (something Windows sharing often does). You can group individual users together and change permissions on folders (called directories in Linux) and files and you don’t have to be in the same OU or workgroup or be part of a domain for them to access those files. You can change permissions on one file and share that out to a single group or multiple groups. Fine grained security over your files places you in the driver seat in control of your own data.

Today, Mark Shuttleworth’s blog was added into Planet Gnome after he made a request for it to be added. Why is this a controversy? Mainly because some people want blogs that are featured on Planet Gnome to be from authors that are active in the Gnome community and to actually blog about Gnome as a topic. If Canonical’s contributions to Gnome are being called into question (as evident from the links in closing thoughts below) then what results is a controversial decision for Mark’s blog to be added in.

Many Linux users use the ‘find’ utility when searching for files using the command line on their system. There are times though where I’m just looking for something and I don’t want to have to wait for the command to scan the entire directory tree in order to track it down. That’s where locate comes in with quick and simple results.

I was quite surprised this morning whilst reading my RSS feeds to discover that Ubuntu has named their most recent ‘lite desktop‘ Unity. Surprised because we have our project, Unity Linux. Strange that both our ‘lightweight distribution and desktop’ and Ubuntu’s ‘lite desktop’ should share a name together.

How does a distribution with 25 packagers maintain 8,600 packages in their repository and come back for more? Here's a look at the new Unity Linux Build Server (buildserv) which was recently designed to allow developers and packagers to point and click RPMs into a testing repository after building both x86 and x86_64 in a chroot...all done "automagically" in the background.